Shelly’s Gen 4 smart home devices take a different approach

If you don’t know Shelley, you should know this. Extremely popular among avid smart home enthusiasts, the company introduced fourth generation of its innovative smart home controls at CES this week.

What makes them different? Instead of supporting Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Zigbee or Matter, the Shelly Gen 4 series supports All these protocols. The user just needs to decide which one they want to use for their specific setup. And if you decide to switch to something else after a few years, you don’t have to start over with new hardware.

Many of Shelly’s lighting control products also look another. This is because many of them are relays that are installed inside the electrical box and behind existing switches. When you connect the two parts together, you turn simple switches and dimmers into smart switches and dimmers with the same amount of effort as it would take to replace a switch. But this is also an advantage: your smart switches will be no different from your stupid ones.

But you don’t even have to deal with electrical wiring to get started with Shelly’s new products. For example, if you just want to control a lamp, you can purchase the Shelly Plug US Gen4 Smart Socket. Plug it into any 120V outlet, connect it to the lamp or small appliance (up to 1800W) you want to control, configure your app, and you’re good to go. And unlike many smart plugs on the market, Shelly’s will also track exactly how much power the device uses.

Going beyond lighting control, the new Shelly Gen4 flood sensor will alert you when water appears where it shouldn’t be, such as under your water heater, dishwasher or washing machine. In addition to the sensor built into the body of this device, it comes with a cable that can detect water along its entire length, so you can monitor multiple appliances with one sensor.

Thanks to Shelly’s protocol independence, you can use its Gen4 devices in almost any smart home ecosystem: Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, Samsung SmartThings… The list goes on. But if you haven’t settled on a smart home hub yet, you might want to consider Shelly’s own X2 wall display. Equipped with a 6.95-inch diagonal color touchscreen, this panel combines ease of use with advanced features such as built-in temperature, humidity and ambient light sensors. X2 also supports custom scene creation and real-time power consumption monitoring.

Shelley expects the first Gen4 units to ship in the first quarter of 2025.